Practical Low-Effort PCG: Tracery and data-oriented PCG authoring

Another video from the Roguelike Celebration, this time about Tracery. Kate Compton talks about her PCG-authoring tool and what people have done with it.

Which is one reason I keep mentioning Tracery: people keep making things with it. I’m even using it as part of my NaNoGenMo novel, to add variations at different levels.

But the other thing about this talk that I want to highlight is Kate’s call for more tools that are as accessible and easy to write new content in. With more ready-made screws in the toolkit, we can focus on writing with the tools (and building new tools on top of the old tools).

One thing that’s been exciting about watching the NaNoGenMo Resources threads is that every year the tools available get more robust and wide-ranging. Back in 2013, pulling books from project Gutenberg and finding sentences that used similar verbs was difficult. Today I can use word2vec, spaCy/textacy, and a Gutenberg Python library to comb through the texts. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next few years will bring.